Malcolm Turnbull says the NBN was a mistake and may never make money

By James Massola

UpdatedOctober 23, 2017 — 11.29amfirst published at 10.13am

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that, in hindsight, the National Broadband Network project was a mistake and blamed the former Labor government for setting up a new government company to deliver the mammoth infrastructure project.

And Mr Turnbull, who was previously the Communications Minister in the Abbott government, admitted the giant project might never make back the money invested by taxpayers.

Despite this, the Prime Minister said his government had no plans to impose a levy or penalty on people who connect to the internet using mobile data connections, rather than the fixed line network.

Customers who connect to the internet via a fixed-line connection that is a competitor to the NBN network will soon have to pay a levy of $7.09 a month to help subsidise the NBN, which is required to offer connections to hard-to-reach customers.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull faced a barrage of questions about the NBN on a visit to the CSR Viridian glass facility in Canberra on MondayCredit:Andrew Meares

NBN Co chief executive Bill Morrow says a similar levy may need to be applied to mobile connections for the NBN to make a profit - or the government may need to consider new regulation to protect the approximately $49 billion network, so that it can receive a return on its investment.

Complaints about the NBN increased by 160 per cent in the last year, according to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, with more and more users revealing they are not getting the speeds they have paid for and, in some cases, are receiving slower speeds than those they achieved on older ADSL connections, which are being phased out.

NBN Co has blamed retail service providers, who sell connections to the network to the public, for the slower than expected speeds and argued retailers have not purchased enough bandwidth to deliver promised speeds.

On Monday, ahead of a Four Corners report into the delivery of the network, Mr Turnbull was asked at a press conference in Canberra if "in hindsight, the project was a mistake" and a "massive waste of money".

"Yes," Mr Turnbull responded.

"Well, it was a mistake to go about it the way they [Labor] did; setting up a new government company to do it was a big mistake. If you want to look at a country that did this exercise better, it's New Zealand, and what they did there was ensure the incumbent telco, the Telstra equivalent, split network operations from retail operations and that network company became, in effect, the NBN," he said.<!--EndFragment-->